Quasi Important Housekeeping Item

I have mentioned that I entered the Robbins World Cup Trading Contest again this year. I did give one update on it where I was ahead about 70%, don't recall exactly. Several difficulties have arisen with trying to manage this account with the Genesis platform, a couple of which have cost me some money. The issue is this: when you have multiple accounts using the genesis platform, there are problems getting all the orders executed correctly. Apparently as I have recently learned, if you are not logged in to a particular account, any OSO ( order submits orders ) do not work. I have 2 accounts there and about to be 3 because I am transferring over a large account to be traded through PFG and the genesis platform.

Generally I place the identical trades in my accounts with the only variable being the number of contracts. I place all my orders nowadays as OSO's meaning that once an entry order is filled it triggers a protective stop on the other side of the position. Since you can enter all these orders in advance, I as well as many other genesis users assumed that all the orders were working. What I learned as the guinea pig for everyone else recently was the following. If you have an order in one of your accounts for example to short the NQ with a corresponding protective stop on the other side, you get an order number for the entry but don't get one for the protective stop. What this means is that the protective stop is synthetic order on your own computer only and has not been sent to the brokerage firms servers. If you then log out of that account and log in to another one and place the same order you would have thought you were covered, and that the order in the other account would transmit once the entries were filled because you are still connected to PFG, not so fast grasshopper.

What I learned the hard way is that the only protective OSO orders that will be submitted are for the account you are logged in with at the time, nice surprise huh? As a result, I had thought I was filled and out of a particular position in my contest account and was not since I happened to be logged in to the other PFG account I trade at the time price traded through the number. I discovered this error quickly but it took literally 2 days of phone calls to try and figure out what the hell happened, all the while this trade was running against me. Nobody could tell me what my position was. I finally just ignored the "not held" disclaimer from the brokerage firm and went to the market to offset what appeared to be a losing short trade. This wound up as of course double the loss it should have been. So what we now know is that contingent OSO orders sit on your computer forever unless you keep logging in and out of all your accounts back and forth, which is just quite frankly a fiasco.

Since we have these monster overnight moves almost on a daily basis, this has left me with having to get up several times during the night to make sure I had stops in when orders fill, and I just cannot live like that. As a result, I am going to fold my trading account balance into my regular account with PFG, hence you will not see my name in the standings any more. This account as it is has been completely mismanaged by me anyway. I have forgotten about it at times and as a result not done trades in it that I did in my other accounts, as well as a few other mistakes. It is just not worth bothering with in light of what I have just described.

I did not want people to think it was because I had lost money, that I am not in the standings anymore. The account is only about +60% now anyway, that error was about a 10% hit bringing me down from 70%, so maybe I would not show on the leaderboard anyway, but I wanted to make this note for the record. Once I get my IRA moved over I am still going to have 2 accounts to deal with this issue on, but 3 would just be impossible to deal with. Genesis is supposedly working on a fix for this issue, but there is no definite timetable set for it so I have no choice but to do this. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in my accounts, so I just cannot risk getting burned again with this.

Maybe next year if the software issue is fixed I will re-enter again, but I will not deal with this anymore it has been a royal pain in the ass especially this last week with this error in the orders which was no fault of my own.